


Christmasland

by Lana_Morrigan



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, NOS4A2 (TV 2019)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Attempted Kidnapping, Aziraphale is "just enough of a bastard to be worth knowing" (Good Omens), BAMF Crowley (Good Omens), Crowley is Good With Kids (Good Omens), Crowley swears a lot, Hurt/Comfort, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), M/M, The Bentley HATES the Wraith
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-25
Updated: 2020-01-25
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:41:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 17,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22394185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lana_Morrigan/pseuds/Lana_Morrigan
Summary: “Where on earth are…”“Narnia - the bloody Twilight Zone - how should I know?” His voice is wound tight but trying to sound vague because they can both feel it - he even more than the angel - and what is there to say? They’ve arrived somewhere that is very, very wrong...Watching NOS4A2 I kept thinking how much the Bentley would loathe the Wraith, and also wondering how a certain angel and demon might react to Christmasland…This is a little more Good Omens-centric than NOS4A2-centric.(For those who don’t know, NOS4A2 is the story of a supernatural car and its driver who abduct children, steal their souls, and turn them into monsters in the dream-realm of Christmasland.)
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 41





	1. Prologue

Ellie blinks her eyes open in confusion. She isn’t on the back seat of the big car: she’s standing outside the vast iron gates of what looks like an amusement park decorated with Christmas ornaments and candy-canes. There’s snow all around and the sky is more bruise purple than true black, but the park is lit brightly with a million dancing lights in all the colours of the rainbow. She’s not alone; there’s an older girl standing near, a gown up sort of girl who must have been ten or eleven, Ellie thinks. The other girl gives her a funny sort of smile, her lips thinning and stretching into a sickle-curve of I-know-something-you-don’t-know. “There’s a present waiting for you.” Her voice is odd, it has a breathy, whistling quality to it, almost a hiss.

“A present?”

“For when you get to Christmasland.” The other girl smiles wider this time, a sly expression edged with teeth. Her face is pinch-white and her hair straight and dark as mourner’s silk.

Ellie isn’t sure she likes the other girl. She’s pretty, but there’s something sorta scary about her too. “What is it?”

“It’s so you can play the game.”

“Game? What sort of game?”

“You’ll like it - we have the best games. You can take a peek now if you want. Here...”

She reaches out and takes what’s handed to her. (And in her half sleep and confusion she would swear - cross her heart and hope to die - that she hadn’t been given a real box - more like a drawing of a box, or the idea of a box. A narrow package neatly wrapped in shining paper, tied with coloured twine.) She hooks her fingers into the sting and pulls, not quite managing to slip it over a corner. Two more frustrated tugs and she finally has it free - or free enough at least to tear back the paper and string and wriggle out the slender box... She stops. The box feels wrong somehow, the worst of all Christmas presents, and suddenly she wants to give it back.

“Open it,” the other girl instructs, the edge of her voice turning as sharp as her teeth.

Ellie knows she should find the strength to refuse, but young girls have been opening boxes they shouldn’t since Pandora - what chance did she stand? The lid comes off and lying in tissue paper inside is a gleaming pair of long-bladed dressmaker’s scissors.

“Welcome to Christmasland,” the other girl says.

Ellie wakes with a jolt: she’s curled up on the back seat of the big car again. She feels strange, like that time she was sick with a fever and had to take a week off school and mama was working so Mrs Carmody from down the street came to watch over her. She hadn’t liked Mrs Carmody much, she’d smelled funny and one of her eyes was always looking at something else. But right now Ellie knows she would cling to Mrs Carmody’s smelly old scratchy cardigan and sob tears of gratitude were she to appear and take her away from Mr Manx and his big ol’ car.

There’s a funny taste in her mouth, something like egg yolks and rust - she doesn’t like it. She lifts up a corner of her nightdress and spits into the fabric. (Mama will scold her and give her chores, but she doesn’t care.) The puddle of her spit is candy-apple red, and in the middle is one small milk-white tooth.


	2. Chapter 2

_I was sweet and I was wild,  
I was my father's only child  
Tired of wantonness he said,  
'My wilful girl - you shall be wed.'  
Fox he came to beg my suit  
With gifts of flowers and gifts of fruit_

Some cars are run-of-the-mill. They come off the production line in their thousands and are as exact and unremarkable as every other model in their line. Some cars are custom made: no two are exactly alike and there are only a dozen or so in existence, lusted over and searched after by collectors with hollow-fingered want… It is safe to say however, that there is no other car in existence quite like the Bentley.

She is a beautiful example of human craftsmanship, but what makes her truly unique is the fact that she has had one ~~careful~~ ~~reckless~~ _singular_ owner from new and he has somewhat rubbed off on her. He doesn’t know that cars don’t run without petrol, so she doesn’t know that either - to this day, she is bemused and faintly disgusted by the very idea of requiring fuel. Her owner is an Occult Being who can think in at least five dimensions at once and as a result she can take corners like a ballerina doing a pirouette on kitchen knives and can slip through gaps in the traffic that would have any other car wrapped around a lamppost or back-ended into a No. 23 bus.

She is, in a word, extraordinary, because Crowley has always thought her so and one can’t help but live up to that sort of belief.

She’s been with Crowley through thick and thin - almost as soon as she rolled off the production line - and has learnt, in her way, to communicate with him via the songs she plays on the radio. He doesn’t often seem to understand her, but he’s never tried to hush her either. Right now, someone or something is trying to steal the Bentley’s voice. And she hates it.

Her radio’s crackling: ‘We Will Rock You’ by Queen is being warped into some tacky tune about Christmas.

Only Hell has ever taken her voice like that and Crowley loathes it as much as she does. But this isn't Hell. This is something else - something not as powerful but more insidious by far that stinks of sugar, pinecones and peppermint. It’s cloyed enough that her whole engine wants to retch. And yet under that - under the candied stench of evergreen and blood and sugar and (teeth?) - there’s desperation, tears, terror and loss.

The Bentley stalls in protest, shocking her demon out of his late-night-four-bottles-of-Bordeaux haze. Crowley blinks, trying to simultaneously sober up and focus through the windscreen. The Bentley’s never stalled - would never dare. So why…? The sky is no longer London-nightlife-bright, but an unkind bruise-yellow. It no longer suggests a rich tapestry of interesting pastimes but more an unforgiving wilderness one could get lost and die in.

_Wait - what the bloody…?_

Dark brows dip, furrowing beneath sunglasses as Eden’s Serpent pays attention to the last half minute of time and realizes that something has just happened - something… _sideways_. (There’s no better way to describe it. They had been driving down Regent Street when there’d been a shift - not unlike a gear shift, but instead of between cogs it was between spaces - between Here and There.) The outside world has changed from the usual chilly late-night London rain-spattered streets to something altogether different: something colder and whiter and more alien by far.

He snags a finger over the bridge of his glasses so he can claw them lower on his nose and peer over them just to make sure. Nope, he’s absolutely right and for once he isn’t in the least bit pleased about it. “ _Ssnow_?” he hisses flatly, annoyed. Oh for _Heaven’s sake!_ They’d had a perfectly nice evening and he was driving his angel home and now the West End had inexplicably segued into a narrow, winding snow-plagued road lined with fir trees and lit by fairylights. Crowley’s mouth sneers, upper lip exposing what might be the beginnings of fangs.

Really. _Really?_ \- fucking _fairylights?_

And whilst the more logical and disgusted part of his brain is flidding about the fairylights, the more Crowley bit of his brain - the original atoms of Crowley that couldn’t be anything else if they tried - thinks, _‘Ah, bugger it, bloody fangs are out! What the even fuck?’_

And he knows the answer to that question is one he’ll hate because it’s, _‘Yes, yes we usually have those hidden deep away, and no we have no bloody idea why they’re itching to manifest fully and the only reason they haven’t stabbed out further is how tightly we’re… wait why am I referring to me in the third person? I’m not even an actual Person for Heaven’s sake, I’m an Occult Being! Never mind why we - I - are - am - I’m grinding my teeth together right now to stop my bloody stupid fangs…’._

He says something very inventive and horribly uncouth in Enochian because the last time he can remember being this put out was a century and a half ago and that had been a simple snit in comparison to some of his previous temper tantrums. He can feel himself start to get annoyed.

To add insult to injury, the Bentley, either in surprise or disgust (he banks strongly on the latter) has for the first time ever, just stalled. “Thrice fucking _blessed,”_ he mutters, nudging the Bentley’s engine back to life. The radio crackles and croons out some cringe-worthy 1940s festive jingle despite the fact it’s only late September.

“Oi!” Crowley snaps. “What the Heaven are you playing at?”

The radio spits, and ‘It’s A Kind Of Magic’ fights valiantly against the Christmas tunes.

Crowley scowls and runs his tongue against the too-long points of his teeth. The Bentley is upset, he can feel it. He pats the steering wheel. “Okay, I get it. Someone’s playing silly buggers. It’s alright, I’ll sort this.”

“Hm-zh - what?” The Principality of the Eastern Gate who had been snoozing in the front passenger seat startles awake, frowning blearily at the white world outside the windscreen and is troubled as to how he hasn’t woken sooner or how in fact he’s been asleep at all. A vague memory of the number of bottles of very good wine they’d imbibed surfaces, as does the suggestion of a headache. He groans and makes a complicated gesture that miraculously sobers him up and disposes of the budding hangover in an instant. It ought to make him feel better. It doesn’t. If the atmosphere both inside the Bentley and out is anything to go by, it appears there is rather a lot wrong and it isn’t anything to do with him. “Crowley…” The word holds a low warning note.

“Yep,” the demon acknowledges.

“Where on earth are…”

“Narnia - the bloody Twilight Zone - how should I know?” His voice is wound tight but trying to sound vague because they can both feel it - he even more than the angel - and what is there to say? They’ve arrived somewhere that is very, very wrong. And they both know neither can leave until this wound in reality is fixed.

The Bentley’s engine revs high and hot in what can only be described as hate as the headlights of another car burn twin cones of butter yellow through the dancing flurries of snow.

Crowley glares at the dark and immaculate Rolls-Royce Wraith that is slowing to a reluctant stop on the narrow road ahead of them.

The demon sits very still for a moment, although his hands are tight against the wheel. The tip of his tongue touches the edge of his teeth again as he inhales, thin lips parted, scenting the air as snakes do. The faintest of frowns, and then his head tips slowly and deliberately to the side, a second and even more supremely serpentine motion.

Aziraphale reaches out to touch his arm but his fingers hover, just shy of his jacket sleeve, uncertain. “Is - is everything…”

“Back in a minute angel,” Crowley says in a darkly blank voice like tar and ashes.

“Oh dear,” Aziraphale murmurs as the demon’s slender figure slips from the Bentley and saunters with a purpose through the snow towards the other car, his silhouette standing out against the headlights before being enveloped by the larger shadow of the Wraith.


	3. Chapter 3

_To win my heart he could not fail,  
With gleaming eyes and bushy tail.  
We swore to love we swore to marry,  
I saw the knife the Fox did carry –  
(It is not so, it was not so and god forbid it should be so!)_

There are three people in the Wraith. The driver is a handsome, dark-haired, middle-aged man with a widow’s peak: he’s sharply dressed in a coat that looks like it belongs to an old-fashioned chauffer’s uniform. There’s a second man in the front passenger seat; scruffy, corpulent and wearing blue mechanic’s overalls.

Crowley’s eyes ghost over them both, taking in every detail without pause as he moves on to the third passenger in the back: a young girl, perhaps five years old, with bare feet and un-brushed hair, wearing a hand-me-down nightdress with a faded pattern of hearts and pink bows on it.

The demon stops - a sudden and ungainly gesture - as he twists to bend down so he can see her more clearly through the window. Her face is blotchy and her eyes red-rimmed; she looks like a child who has stopped crying only because they are utterly exhausted and can’t keep it up any more.

Crowley’s sunglasses are still low on his nose and the inhuman amber of his eyes is unmistakable as he peers at her. She doesn’t recoil, instead she tenses and then leans towards the door, a wary but desperate hope in her expression, one small hand offered up to thump against the glass of the window, fingers splayed.

There are some things that are human and human alone - Crowley should know, he’s watched all of them. It’s not just the smiles or the frowns; those are human only because of facial anatomy. It’s the gestures - it’s the weird little things that humans do that are universally recognizable despite language - even without language. The Almighty’s curse against the Tower of Babel didn’t take entirely; even when robbed of speech, need and panic can clearly express themselves.

The Serpent of Eden stills, staring back at the child as she stares at him, palm pressed against the glass, eyes wide. He remembers the Flood. Gomorrah. Sodom. Egypt. He remembers all the times the Almighty had pressed down Her hand. He remembers all the other times She hadn’t interfered - even when surely She should have - and it had only been Humanity, struggling alone…

* * *

The trouble with the Almighty is She plays by Her own rules and you can never hope to comprehend them. Even asking questions about those rules can get you booted out of the member’s club…

Crowley’s Fall had been a burning bolt of agony that he wouldn’t even wish on Hastur - but only because then the bastard would still be Heaven’s problem, not Crowley’s, so that’s not out of actual compassion, per se.

Despite his fatal curiosity, Crowley has bit his lip over the millennia and never asked his fellow demons the questions he wishes to ask the Almighty if he believed for one nano-second She was listening. It’s an old question - a question as old as the Fall but it’s so simple one would never guess its power - and yet it contains the power of the Universe itself.

_WHY?_

One word in Enochian had caused Crowley to fall from Grace, from the Silver City, down, down, down, into boiling sulfur. It was never a question he asked lightly but no matter the pain it’s one he cannot rid himself of.

But to balance the Cosmic Scales, if such there are, Crowley’s Fall had been out of curiosity and not spite which is why he retains his wings: they're midnight black, sheened with starlight and the faintest hues of the nebula he built aeons ago, his feathers stained with the dust of their trade like any craftsman.

He loves the stars more than he can ever put into words, but he is not beyond rending them to ash if he must. He’d previously thought he would only do such a thing for his angel. But standing beside that car with its passengers, fat flurries of snow trying to chill him, with the child’s hand still smudging the fog of the glass… Crowley knows he’ll burn through every constellation he ever made to make certain that this - whatever the Heaven this is - stops.

Aziraphale frequently complains about the Demon’s delicate and over-dramatic sense of philosophy, but in truth Crowley’s attitude has hardened over the years. But there are still some lines he refuses to cross. One of those - point blank - is kids. He refuses to tempt or kill children.

He tells Hell there’s no point in tempting children because it could all be washed away when they lose their parents or meet there first love, read a book, find a puppy - anything really. Children are malleable, yes, but they’re too malleable. You could win a kid over with Turkish Delight, and next day they’d be coming at you with a sword in the name of the Almighty. That’s what he always says in the reports, anyway. And it follows to reason, that if there’s no point corrupting children, you have to let them live so they can grow into sin, right? That’s just logic, that is. Why let them die innocent - that’s just another soul for Heaven…

It isn’t much of an argument, but Hell isn’t an institution that favours philosophy. They’d questioned, they’d argued, they’d Fallen, they’d lost. They welcome philosophers to various circles (Virtuous Pagans being the most prevalent) but they don’t bother listening to them - what’s the blessed point?

Crowley never hung out with the Pagans in the First Circle either but that’s because he’d been on Earth sitting under trees or on woven blankets or animal skins, sipping something alcoholic and nibbling on some tidbit as he listened to them trying to make sense of their Human existence and the complexities of the Free Will they’d been gifted.

Children have died before - have been sacrificed before and Crowley twitches every time because he is a very Singular Being: one who was punished punitively for Asking, who offered Humanity Free Will, who still laments the Flood, and was commended for the Spanish Inquisition despite having nothing to do with it and then spent a month drunk and puking in a tavern after curiosity had got the better of him.

(Curiosity is Crowley’s obvious downfall: it’s a pit he’s flung himself into again and again. A fondness for whisky and a delight in being a mouthy and contrary bastard when he pleases are also weaknesses, but ones that are less relevant here.)

But, apparently the most singular aspect of his character is that when the iron pin of morality had been pulled out of him as he Fell, some magnetized rust filings remained and they all seemed to align into, ‘Don’t be cruel to children’.

* * *

With tight, deliberate movements, he pushes his glasses back to their more customary position on the bridge of his nose, straightens, hooks his thumbs in his pockets, steps away from the Wraith and turns his gaze through the snow towards the Bentley. “Oh _angel?”_ he calls in a quiet, tense tone that nonetheless carries through the cold air.

A moment later there’s the sound of the Bentley’s passenger door opening and shutting and then Aziraphale’s pale-edged silhouette as he’s caught between two opposing sets of headlights, the tips of his curls phosphor-white.

Crowley moves to meet him before he reaches the Wraith.

“Oh - oh my,” the angel murmurs unhappily as he senses the other car and all it represents.

(Much has been written suggesting that angels are supremely aware of love - and this is true. Angels can sense love and Virtue in all iterations of their forms. Demons can sense hate and Sin in the same way. But polar opposites - if you care to look - are really more of a Mobius Loop than true opposites. Or to put it another way, Crowley now knows what this situation means without a single fucking doubt and Aziraphale has a horrible feeling in his gut he wishes he could ignore but knows he can’t.)

Crowley is smart, but in no way omnipotent. He knows he can’t fix this on his own but he also knows he’ll have to be very careful how he involves Aziraphale because this strange slip-road of reality won’t survive a full-on instance of Angelic Wrath. If Aziraphale finds out too much about the place Crowley can scent like rancid sugar on the end of his tongue -

_Christmasland_

\- his angel would likely tear up this whole side-reality, and the kid would probably die, the space-time continuum would unravel and they’d discorporate or get lost in some sort of unreality-fragment/Phantom-Zone never to return. Which, Crowley’s 1000% certain, is not how he wants to end this evening.

 _(Our side - our side, angel - we’re on our side now - our side - you can leave this to me…)_ The words repeat at the back of his head, a mantra, a plea. There isn’t a reply as such but there is a sort of acknowledgement - the slightest nod - which is all Crowley needs. He touches a hand to the angel’s elbow against the cashmere of his coat, his thin fingers giving a gentle squeeze of reassurance.

Aziraphale frowns, a brief darting down of pale brows before he ventures a small smile in return. He doesn’t know exactly what’s afoot but he’ll follow Crowley’s lead if that’s what’s needed. They’ve known each other for six millennia, have faced down Armageddon hand in hand with the Antichrist, they’ve - well… there’s no need to expose information of such a personal nature, but suffice to say their relationship has moved from friendship into… trust of a very intimate kind. Which is entirely beside the point, utterly irreverent, and Crowley cupping his elbow like that had not been distracting in the least and certainly hadn’t reminded him when Crowley’s clever fingers had last cupped his jaw or his - oh good Lord, pay attention!

The Serpent of Eden smiles, a cold, thin, knife-cut of a smile as he half-stuffs his hands into too-small jean pockets and does something with his hips that Aziraphale has yet to school himself not to be distracted by.

“Gonna have a little chat with the driver.” He isn’t hissing but the words have a particularly careful, enunciated and drawn out quality to them that’s only a street away from losing form in fury. “Have a word with the other one in the front would you?”

“My dear, are you alri…”

“No,” Crowley says, flat and clear.

“Ah. Hmm,” Aziraphale says with a dip of his head in understanding.

They’re still both standing there on a snowy road, two shadows, one narrow-dark and one broader-light but both in the balance, caught in the twin light and shadow betwixt two sets of yellow-white headlights.

 _Balance_ , the demon sneers, and then wants to stab something. _Because this isn’t bloody balance - never has been. Are there one too many saints in the world - is that it - is that why this is allowed to happen?_ He can feel his anger ratcheting up a notch. _Never mind that, fuck the ridiculous dichotomy of Humanity and whether it’s what She has Planned. Fuck why we’re here, fuck why this parasite is allowed to exist or that thing in the passenger seat… Aziraphale is here. A child is here. Concentrate._

The demon hunches his head and shoulders in what looks like a sulk but is really a ploy to mask his swallowing back bile. He can taste the scent of this place - its character and history - more strongly now. Like cold, like snow, it’s cumulative and seeks with patient fingers to chill and permeate all it touches. He almost retches again. He twitches a nod towards the front passenger seat of the Wraith. “If I talk to Bing,” he says, “I’m gonna have no choice but to post him down below with my compliments.” The knowledge of the man’s name isn’t anything Occult - it’s on his overall pocket for all to see. Crowley’s lips pull thin and taught as a zip line. “I suggest _you_ field this - aim for a bit of redemption,” he says with a too-wide grin whilst his voice makes it sound like he’s spitting masonry nails into the mingled frost and sludge at their feet. “Don’t go _too_ angelic on him…”

Aziraphale’s brows tense again and meet unhappily like needles of worry wishing to knit a scarf of woe. He tried unsuccessfully to smooth away his doubts and expression. This was not the time to fret, this was the time to do what must be done because Crowley had asked him of it. (In a ridiculous round about way, yes, but Crowley has always been fine with asking for information but abominable with asking for anything else. Like help, for example. Bloody Serpent…) And the feelings - the aura - emanating from that car - those men - they're…

“Angel?” Crowley’s hand is suddenly on Aziraphale’s arm again, narrow fingers digging into his coat. “This - this place - can you feel it?” The demon’s voice is as low and as serious as the angel can ever recall hearing. “It’s delicate. There’s only so much power we can exert…”

Aziraphale grasps the wrong end of the metaphorical stick as he so often does, assuming Crowley is concerned with saving their own corporeal forms. His expression darkens. “I was taught demons were without compassion - here at long last I’m proved wrong…” he scolds with scathing sarcasm.

Crowley twists and makes a wordless sound of anger and frustration, curling in upon himself before he flings himself against Aziraphale, knocking him back a half pace out of surprise. “There’s a kid,” he growls against the angel’s collar. “A kid in the back of the car. And there’s sssomething - something going on - I can’t ssnap her out. An’ if we push too hard, this whole place - wherever the fuck in creation we are - is gonna fall like a house of cards.”

“Oh,” Aziraphale re-evaluates rather swiftly. He takes a breath, then huffs it out. “I’m sorry my dear, it’s this place… It’s - it’s wrong in a way one can’t quite put a finger on and doesn’t wish to, if you follow?”

Crowley’s expression softens because he understands all too well. “Yeah, I follow... But…”

Aziraphale dips his head ever so slightly. “Oh, I shall deal with Bing my dear.” He raises the brilliance of his gaze and fixes it upon Crowley until the demon acknowledges it. “You shall do whatever it is you need to do. And neither of us shall leave until the child is safe where they belong.”

The rust-iron rigidity of his posture falls away and Crowley smiles, his narrow, crooked bite-back-the-fangs smile, his torso - two toast racks balanced on knives - losing its confrontational angles. He turns on his heel and in his next step has reverted back to the insultingly liquid Serpent of Eden, sauntering slowly through the snow.


	4. Chapter 4

_The wood was dark the grass was green,  
The path by moonlight clearly seen,  
Still of night I reached his gate,  
The words on which I'll now relate:  
'Be bold, be bold, but not too bold,  
Least thy heart's blood e'er run cold'._

It isn’t that Crowley wishes to have anything to do with the Wraith or its owner, it’s simply that he knows with every mote of his existence, that this man (or creature - this thing) believes in what he does with the serene righteousness of a fanatic. Even an angel wouldn’t be able to shake him from his course.

But, like every villain who ever believed in their own cause, they are not immune to temptation. Sometimes, you really could send a demon to do an angel’s job.

Crowley taps on the window trying not to grimace - he enjoys touching the Wraith about as much as he enjoys shaking hands with Hastur. “You - thing in the car - get out.”

The driver’s expression is one of entertaining fools with the greatest of reluctance but only because they are skating on thin ice and he hopes soon to watch them drown. He opens the door and gets out, keeping the door between them like a shield, his gloved hand resting on the window frame. “My, what a very discourteous greeting. And from one who is guilty of trespass!” He has a smooth, rich voice, one that projects confidence but is more than capable of curdling with spite or disdain. “I am Mister Manx and the land you are in has been my private property for more than eighty years…”

 _“Mr Manx?”_ Crowley echoes incredulously, his mind flashing back to the Mr Men books he’d read to Warlock, and now imagining the driver as a grey coloured shape with legs and a chauffeur’s hat. “What sort of name is that? It’s not as bad a ‘Bing’ I suppose, but then you can’t get much worse. Well, Roger Dix is probably worse,” he concedes and then frowns slightly, a host of unusual and unfortunate names just itching to trip off his tongue. “Or Wan Kerr. And Moe Lester is really…”

Manx raises his voice, in no mood to listen to a monologue on the nature of nomenclature. “As I have explained in the past to Bing, I have two distinct lists onto which everybody falls. The Nice List is an infinitely preferable place to be from the Naughty List…” He falters; for the first time his powers have failed him. He reached for the man’s name, and no name was there.

The man-shaped-being in question hasn’t noticed. “The naughty list? Can you _hear_ yourself right now?”

“You are swiftly falling from my good graces…”

Crowley lets out a bark of laughter. “Oh dear,” he says mildly.

Manx’s eyes glint dark, hard and sharp like knapped obsidian, but his voice remains level. “You’ve failed to grasp the situation, like so many others before you. This is my world and here my wishes are both manifest and sacrosanct. I have no notion of how you have come to be here, Mister…?”

“Crowley.”

“Mister Crowley. But the universe does like to throw up these little quirks now and again I suppose. Never the less, I am a busy man. What began as an amusement is fast becoming an unwelcome disruption.”

The demon’s head tips to the side. Is it his imagination, or is Manx older than he’d been at the beginning of their conversation? No, he definitely is. Huh. That’s a thing.

“I am a busy man with appointments to keep…”

“What sort of appointment has you driving a crying kid in a nightie through the night on a road like this?”

“I am on a mission of mercy…”

Crowley scoffs and leans to the side so he can see round Manx to the back seat window. The girl is kneeling up on the seat, her body canted at an awkward angle against the upholstery so she can watch him around Manx and the open driver’s door. One hand is gripping the lip of the closed window, and her face is pressed so close against it her breath fogs the glass. She has something on her lips and round her mouth that might be the remains of a jam sandwich, but which Crowley knows is not.

He looks into her eyes and sees not just fear but a battle. On the one side are the adults who abandoned her, left her to fend for herself when she ought to have been supported. On the other side is something winter-hungry and feral that promises to fit her with fangs and give her a pack to run with.

Children don’t become demons. Angels become demons; humanity can only be damned. This is neither of those things - and Crowley ought to know. This is something else, an existence as a monstrosity without reprieve.

(Sometimes humanity’s capacity for low-grade evil and misery impresses Crowley; other times it depresses him; and every once in a while it makes him blindly furious because Satan give him strength - there’s no call to go around doing _that_ sort of thing to one another.)

This isn’t some sort of demonic plot he can get behind and appreciate as it radiates chaos and change. This is… wrong. No demon - even from the foulest pits - would change a child’s body and wither their soul like this. Even Hell has standards. This is violation and corruption on a more human scale.

Manx and his associate are slowly winding Crowley up to being a small supernova of incandescent rage…

“Mister Crowley. Many good people in this world work tirelessly to rescue children from unfit homes and to place them where they may finally be happy. I am one of those such individuals.”

“Ohhh, right,” the demon agrees with an insincerity that’s staggering. “And that’s why she’s crying, is it?”

Manx drums his fingers on the frame of the window, trying to keep hold of his temper. “Separation from one’s home - even if it is steeped in wickedness - is a disquieting and emotional experience. Children are innocents and their emotions are simple. The delay you are causing is only furthering Ellie’s distress; if she is shedding tears then the fault is yours. Now. If you don’t mind, you’re in my way…”

Crowley gives an insulting bow and an equaling insulting smile. “Forgive me - didn’t you say that this place is entirely subject to your whims? Why don’t you just ‘whim’ me out the way? Or make the road bigger?” He straightens from his bow enough to stare the other man in the face as a wide, shit-eating grin spreads over his own. “You can’t, can you?”

“If you don’t move out of the way and let me pass I’ll…”

“You’ll what?” he demands, the ‘T’ exiting between his fangs with a snap.

“I’ll be forced to take measures to remove you.”

“Hm," he sniffs. "Gonna run me off the road are you? Alright. Dare you.”

Manx isn’t used to dealing with people who don’t find him intimidating. “I beg your pardon?”

“You heard.” A long look at both Manx and the Wraith and then a snort. “I’ll spell it out, shall I? Dear Firmament, you’re blessed slow. Your _car_. Your car is a piece of _shit_ I wouldn’t _piss_ on to put out if it were on _fire_.”

Manx pales, two high spots of colour burning on his cheeks

“That Rolls is heavier than the Bentley. Newer too. Could do her some real damage.” Crowley smiles, his lips sharp at one edge. “But I wonder what it would cost you?”

Manx smiles in turn, a practiced expression that for all its schooling can’t help but look inhuman. “I’ve known better than you.”

“Oh yeah?” he enquires cheerfully.

“Oh yes. Girls are always more interesting.”

Crowley’s wings twitch. The way Manx said that, it was in the tones of a hunter who preferred one type of prey not only for their cleverness during the hunt but the flavor of their terror as he ran them down.

* * *

Crawly (as he’d been called back then) had tempted Eve rather than Adam, true, but not because she was weaker or it amused him to do so. After the Nameless Wife, then Lilith, Adam had a lot of experience one way or another. Crawly had chatted with Eve because he’d felt if anyone needed to be raised a bit in the experience stakes it was her. (And if it muddied Adam’s rep somehow, well, that was a plus.)

He had nudged Eve into seeing the Garden with new eyes, and then as any spouse would she had introduced her husband to it: showing him that the cloistered Garden was not the World entire. And Crawly had felt a strange sort of pride at Eve’s wish for change, at her willingness to transgress and step into the unknown for the sake of curiosity and knowledge. (He’d witnessed the unmaking of the Nameless Wife and later Lilith’s exile, so perhaps he’d been a little naïve in thinking the Almighty’s reaction would be nothing more than a stern ticking off. But he hadn’t considered - never imagined - that his little pep-talk to Eve would have resulted in Original Sin and the closing of Eden’s gates forever.)

It was at that point in time that Crawly developed Imagination in the same way that those exposed to Consumption develop a bloody cough. He didn’t mean to, it was a reaction against God and Creation for which there was no inoculation. And that in and of itself has amused him down the years. But he’s always known it would catch up with him one way or another.

Crowley has no wish to imagine whether the ‘interesting girls’ are young ones like the kid in the back, or are older ones with which Manx has different, more vicious sport with. Crowley doesn’t in fact wish to imagine a single thing about Manx unless it’s his body staked at a crossroads and burnt in hellfire.

* * *

“More interesting,” Crowley echoes between ground ivory, somehow - Satan knows how, because he doesn’t - sounding almost insouciant.

“They always are the most inventive Creatives.” Behind him on the other side of the Wraith, Manx hears the passenger door close and feels the car rock and re-settle as Bing’s hefty weight leaves the chasse. Good - Bing had been depressingly tardy in taking the initiative to deal with their other trespasser, the too-prim-looking man in the camelhair coat. _That is the problem with loyalty,_ Manx muses. _It is often present at the cost of ingenuity._

The demon makes a purposefully indifferent sound. “Wellll... You don’t have anything to worry about then, do you? This is your terrain, and I’m just a bloke. Should be easy enough for you.”

“I don’t have _time_ for…”

“Mm, I can see that. But funny thing is, I do. I’ve got all the time in the world.”

Manx looks at the slender black-clad figure before him with his sharp face and his rust-red beatnik hair and his ridiculous sunglasses, and for the first time in a very long time he feels the dark flame of hate ignite in his heart.

“What d’you say, hm? A good old-fashioned game of chicken, eh? If we each reverse, oh I dunno, four hundred yards back down the road, that should give us enough of a run up to really make a go of it…”

He’s never known a Creative to offer to risk their Knife at all, let alone so recklessly. “You’d risk your means of access, your transport, your very soul?”

Crowley shrugs and, “Wouldn’t be the first time,” he mutters.

“What are the terms?”

“Each go four hundred yards back and wait. I’ll flick my lights when I’m ready. Soon as you flick your lights, we drive.”

This gives Manx a very slight advantage - something Mr Crowley must realize - the arrogance of the man! “And the prize?”

“What d’you fancy?”

“If I win, I take you and your K- _car_ to Christmasland.”

“Alright. If you lose, I get to take you an’ yours to _my_ Christmasland. Deal?”

“Very well.” Manx offers one gloved hand.

Crowley looks at it for a long moment before shaking it in agreement. “Righty-right. See you on the road.” He turns on his heel and walks away with a swagger, a casual call of, “Caio!” flung over his shoulder.

Manx watches as Mr Crowley becomes nothing more than a shadow in the headlights, before he steps into the darkness by the Bentley and disappears from view.

He grits his teeth and swings himself angrily into the driver’s seat of the Wraith. He slams the door shut and sits for a moment with his hands clenched tight against the wheel, shoulders hunched, drawing deep breathes into his lungs until he can trust his temper. He sits straight again and catches sight of his face in the rear-view mirror. His hair has faded to pewter and wrinkles have sprouted like vines around his eyes and at the corners of his mouth, across his forehead too. This delay has cost him twenty years.

Bing - useless lumpen irrelevance that he is - is still in the trees somewhere, dealing with the second interloper. Well. Bing will just have to fend for himself until Manx can be bothered to find him - if he bothers at all.

Manx catches Ellie watching him warily from the backseat and smiles at her reflection. “You must forgive me, Ellie Atherton. I promised to deliver you to Christmasland and so I shall, for I am a man of my word. I could not deprive you of the company of the other Christmasland children who are anxious to welcome you so you may become the very best of friends. However, before that can happen, it seems we have one slight obstacle to overcome first…”


	5. Chapter 5

_In the Fox's house I did see  
Beautiful maids two score and three  
Slashed and dashed they were all dead,  
Their necks in smiling slits of red.  
Hark! My lord he was at his door,  
Dragging a new maid 'cross the floor._

Aziraphale watches Crowley for a few moments more, appreciating the pleasing contrast his lithe figure and red hair make against the dancing white of the snow. Then he sighs, straightens his waistcoat and tugs the opening of his overcoat more snugly closed before he too approaches the dark brute of the Rolls-Royce Wraith that is still idling, brooding and waiting. He stoops a little at the passenger door so he can see the man inside. Not exactly the best and brightest specimen of humanity, the angel has to admit. Still, Aziraphale - unlike the rest of the Host - does prefer to give humans the benefit of the doubt rather than judge them over-harshly. He taps daintily with two knuckles on the window and smiles pleasantly as Bing at first tries to ignore him, then affects to have suddenly noticed him when it’s clear he’s not leaving, and at last winds down the window.

“Hello. Ah, that is to say, good evening.”

“Go-good evening. Uh. Sir.”

“How dreadfully rude of me,” the angel laments, “I do apologize. You are Mr Bing, are you not?”

Bing nods.

“Of course you are - it says it there on your natty set of overalls. Well, I’m - that is, you’d best call me Mr Fell. Wonderful to make your acquaintance.” Aziraphale offers his hand in the neutral space of the open window.

Not knowing what else to do (Mr Manx was talking to that skinny fella and Mr Manx did not like to be interrupted when he was talking) Bing wipes his palm on the leg of his overalls then accepts the well-manicured hand in his own decidedly larger paw and shakes it.

“Splendid!”

Bing tries to extract and reclaim his hand from Mr Fell’s, but despite their obvious size difference in both height and weight, he finds he can’t: his hand is still trapped in the clasp of Mr Fell’s soft, neat fingers.

“I was rather hoping,” Mr Fell says in an apologetic yet cheerful tone, “that you and I could have a little chat about the company you’re keeping.”

“I’m - I’m helping Mr Manx. He’s my employer…” Bing’s voice is caught between belligerent and pleading because he can’t understand how this fussy, pale, soft-looking man can still be holding onto his hand when he doesn’t want him to. Bing gives another surreptitious tug and then a blatant one: nothing happens, their hands could be set in granite for all the difference it makes. Mr Fell doesn’t even seem to have noticed. Unease starts to squirm deep in Bing’s substantial gut.

“Ah, the gentleman in the chauffeur’s livery, of course. Might I ask what it is you do for Mr Manx?”

“I… I help,” he mumbles. Mr Fell stares at him with eyes that are far too blue. Bing doesn’t like it. “I h-help Mr Manx take the children to Christmasland.”

“I see. Do you take many children?”

Bing feels on stronger ground here. “Oh no, only the special ones. Mr Manx has a list - two lists,” he corrects himself with a wince. “Only children on the Nice list get taken to Christmasland. Mr Manx said if I was very good he’d take me to Christmasland!” He looks at Mr Fell, longing and a fragile fledgling joy suffused in his face. To his surprise, Mr Fell’s smile turns watery at the edges as if it might melt off his face altogether and the piercing blue of his eyes softens.

“Is that where you wish to go?”

Bing nods. “Yes, sir. More than anything.”

Aziraphale tries to keep the look of pain from his expression and closes his eyes with a long sigh. When he opens them again his mask of mild beneficence is firmly back in place. “I would like you to listen to me very carefully. Mr Bing, I can see that you have encountered many hardships in your life and that circumstances have been arrayed against you. Whilst one may be forgiven for striking out in anger against your persecutor…” The angel swallows. “There are other sins that are harder to atone for.”

He can’t see Bing’s memories, but he can see his soul: it’s a terrible canvas showing humiliation, weakness and sorrow that metamorphosed into rage, violation and emptiness. Even after that Bing had struggled to live a quiet and simple life, but the world conspired to brutalize his few remaining good instincts until now he believed Christmasland to be his salvation and Mr Manx his saviour.

“Mr Bing, I shall tell you, and you shall hear the truth within my words: Mr Manx is a very bad man. He is coercing you to aid him in stealing away innocents. At this moment, two futures lie before you; one is the peace gained from redemption, and the other is extremely bad indeed.”

Something happens in Bing’s head then, a jumble of images and sensations that shoot through his brain and every nerve in his body. He doesn’t really understand it, but he feels as if for a second (forever) he’s standing in a beautiful sunlit garden, and then the next instance (eternity) he’s drowning in liquid agony. He sucks in a shocked breath and tries again to pull his hand away from Mr Fell’s.

“Mr Bing…” he says with quiet command, waiting until that man’s eyes snap back to his. “Both those places lie at your feet. Which way will you step?”

Bing only realizes he’s crying when his nose starts to run, dribbling snot down his mustache. “Th-the f-first one. I want t-the first one, M-mr Fell.”

“I’m relieved to hear it. Then I think it best if you leave both this car and Mr Manx’s patronage behind, don’t you?”

Bing nods enthusiastically and begins scrabbling frantically with the door handle even before his hand is released. “Th-thank you, thank you sir,” he mumbles, incoherent with a dizzying mix of relief and panic.

Aziraphale steps back, allowing Bing to stumble out of the car, through the snow bank at the edge of the road and away into the darkness of the pine trees.

The angel looks into the interior of the Wraith; there is what appears to be a dividing screen separating the front and back of the car, much as there are in London’s Black Cabs. But unlike the city taxis, this doesn’t slide open and it isn’t made of glass. Aziraphale isn’t certain what it’s made from, but he can see Crowley was right: it would take more than a snap of the fingers to get the child out. The back passenger doors are both locked of course; even as he peers in the child scrabbles over to the passenger door that is closest to him and starts to tug at both the lock and the handle. Neither budge.

Aziraphale gives her what he hopes is a reassuring smile and allows his aura to burn a little brighter, radiating comfort and goodwill. The child looks baffled at first but then gives a cautious nod and sits back in the middle of the seat, hugging her knees, waiting.

With a sigh, he quietly closes the front passenger door and walks, unnoticed, back to the Bentley.


	6. Chapter 6

_He coveted the jewels she had,  
With greed and lust his eyes were mad,  
On her thumb a gold wedding band,  
Fox raised his sword and cleaved her hand –  
(It is not so, it was not so and god forbid it should be so!)  
As those poor dead lips he hungr'ly kissed,  
Lord Fox ne'er saw what he had missed._

They stand beside the Bentley, masked from sight by the glare of the headlights and Aziraphale’s continued polite suggestion to the universe that they not be seen.

“Well…” The angel tries not to fret. It isn’t that he _can’t_ drive the Bentley of course, it’s that out of the two of them he feels this task is more Crowley’s forte. “But I don’t even _like_ driving quickly,” he protests.

“That’s not an issue, angel. Look, it’s perfectly simple. Reinforce the front of the Bentley with the Host’s heavenly armour of blessed righteousness or whatever it is you lot use, then drive at the Wraith until you push it off the road and pin it to a tree. The Bentley will do most of the actual driving…”

The Bentley’s engine growls an enthusiastic assent.

“See?”

“I thought you said this place was too delicate…”

“Oh - yeah - it’s shaky, believe me,” Crowley agrees with a grimace. “But you’re not casting miracles on anything _here_ , just the Bentley. And given her current mood I don’t think she’ll mind in the least.”

The angel is aware Crowley has, since the Apocalypse-That-Might-Have-Been, begun to refer to his car as ‘she’, but he hadn’t realized the depths of anthropomophization he’d sunk to. “Current _mood?”_

“Yeah, she _really_ hates the Wraith,” Crowley confides.

“This had better not be some ridiculous confrontation to prove a point of pride…”

“It’s a distraction,” he hisses, “so I can grab the kid. What do you take me for?”

“How on earth will you do that? Crowley, promise me you won’t do anything foolhardy…”

Eden’s Serpent grins, beatifically wicked. “Oh angel, I can promise you I absolutely will.” He brushes a kiss to Aziraphale’s knuckles and then his fingertips to the Bentley’s dark, snow-flecked bonnet. “Reverse up to that weird stick reindeer we passed four hundred yards back and flash your lights when you’re ready. When the Wraith does the same, run it down. Alright?”

The Bentley’s engine makes an odd sound that could, Aziraphale supposes, be taken for agreement if one had the imagination to be so inclined. “What if I’m discorporated?” he complains.

Crowley lifts an eyebrow. “Then Heaven’s armour really _has_ gone downhill since I was there. Maybe I should tell downstairs…?”

“Oh for goodness sake! Fine,” he agrees in his most prim and huffy voice that tells anyone who’s listening that this is not fine at all.

The demon ignores him and smiles. “Remember, pin that bastard to a tree, yeah?”

“But the child…”

“I _told_ you. I’ll get the kid,” he says as he walks round to the back of the car and opens the boot, fishing out something from a metal toolbox inside. “Don’t mind if I borrow this, do you?”

Aziraphale is squinting trying to see what it is when he realizes Crowley’s talking to his car.

“’Course I’ll bring it straight back!” He closes the boot and as the latches click his wings manifest with a low billowing snap of air and disordered snowflakes. “Remember - give ‘em Hell!” he quips with a grin before plunging his wings down and swooping up into the darkness of the sky.

“You’re ridiculous,” Aziraphale mutters. “I don’t even know why I like you.” He is being peevish, he’s well aware. It’s a quality Crowley often brings out in him for no other reason than the angel has long ago discovered that being peevish distracts him from being worried.

* * *

At the end of her heroic journey round the M25, parked outside an airbase in Tadfield, when the Bentley had finally succumbed to the flames that wracked her and exploded, two objects were flung clear of her metal carcass. The first was her hood ornament - a stylised ‘B’ - and the second was the starter-crank that sat in her toolbox. (Vintage cars used to require their engines to be started by hand: manually turned over much as an old clock is wound with a key. By the time of the Bentley’s production in 1933, engines could be started automatically, but a starter-crank was frequently included in their toolbox in case the engine stalled and needed some encouragement. The Bentley had never required her starter-crank, and would frankly have been mortified if she ever had.)

What the Bentley didn’t know, was that after her demise Crowley had staggered forward in disbelief before sagging to his knees on the tarmac. “Ninety years and not a scratch - now look at you…” He’d been so focused in his misery that he’d even shouted at Aziraphale - “I am having a moment here!” - and for the first time in six millennia had ignored the angel’s plea for assistance. Then, “Rest in peace,” he’d told her, and picked up and kissed the crank as if it was a saint’s relic. “You were a good car.” Finally he’d risen to his feet and walked back to Aziraphale, holding the starter-crank in a death-grip, ready to face the Apocalypse.

Crowley had stood his ground against the manifestation of Lucifer with that starter-crank in his hand. It might not have been a Relic then but it is now: it withstood Satan and was touched by the Antichrist himself. It’s more than enough to punch the Wraith in the face - or straight through a window.

* * *

The angel sits in the driver’s seat of the Bentley and is supremely discomforted to be there. The Bentley is familiar of course and smells of warm leather and polished wood, with just a hint of Crowley’s aftershave and brimstone mingled in. But he feels as if he has stepped through a mirror and everything is a reflection of what it ought to be…

He tuts at his own foolishness. “It worked out all right for Alice,” he reminds himself before closing his eyes and allowing the righteous grace of divinity that spins at the core of his essence to exude from his aura and infuse every atom of the Bentley.

(To give an idea of the Bentley’s current indestructability at this moment, it is as if her chasse and frame have been made of a sanctified alloy of titanium, chromium, tungsten and diamond whilst her insides have been filled with an invisible, breathable, visco-elastic polyurethane capable of absorbing the shock of being hit by a freight train.)

The car’s engine gives a startled hiccup and then settles back into its more usual purr.

“Well…” He isn’t used to talking to the Bentley but he thinks if there’s a time to start that time is certainly now. “If you’re ready, my dear. Shall we?”

The Bentley’s engine revs eagerly like a thunder-head on the move.

“Then let’s not let him down.” So saying, Aziraphale turns the headlights off for the count of two, and back on again.

* * *

There is a sky banked with stars and clouds although not a one of them are the sort of clouds or stars one can see from Earth - as well Crowley knows, thank you very much. Six thousand years on Earth and he can recognize a bloody weather system. Don’t even ask how he recognizes the stars - he built half of them - the question’s insulting. There’s a moon too and Crowley is careful to always stay in its shadow. It wears a parody of Manx’s face: he instinctively swerves clear of it as swiftly as he’d steer clear of Hastur.

Just above the pine trees, amber eyes fix upon the Wraith and midnight wings pull in taught and tense as a falcon: Crowley watches the road and the Wraith.

The Demon knows this reality is fragile but he doesn’t know _how_ fragile exactly. All he knows is that the more it is influenced, the more unstable it will become. He wishes he could snap his fingers, turn the Wraith’s engine into something squelchy and Primordial - preferably with tentacles. But he can’t, not without punching a hole straight through this odd little bubble of dreamtime they are in. So as usual when he can’t achieve what he wants via a miracle, he has to resort to shenanigans. Usually Crowley loves shenanigans - big fan of shenanigans, he is. But he has a suspicion that this time they’re gonna hurt…

* * *

Charlie Manx is not a happy man. He is also at least five years older than he had been five minutes ago and that was ten years older than the ten minutes before that. It had never happened like this before - Christmasland welcomed him - healed him - just driving the Wraith steadied his every heartbeat - why was it different this time?

“Not a difficult question,” he mutters to himself. “Even a huckleberry, the flattest of rubes, could answer that…” (Carney Talk was not a patois that Manx had grown up with but he’d learnt it around ‘48 when Mr LeMarc’s wife, Lew, had come to stay. She knew all the patter, and she’d been so good with the children!) He allows his mouth to twist; he bites his teeth against his lip in displeasure with ivories less prominent but no less sharp than those of his children. He strives not to snarl, _‘Bentley!’_ because he knows how dreams work - is a master of dreams - and knows too that names have power. It’s that other damn car - that damn Jonah of a thing - that’s turning his luck to sludge and interfering with his plans. For reasons he can’t quite pin down the other car reminds him faintly of Jolene. But it can’t be her - can it? No - no! She’s tucked away in hospital, broken, wrapped and bound in white, endless days of white. He has nothing to fear from her. So who can it be?

His map has remained clear. Pennywise’s Circus came and went through the years, rising and falling to its own personal tide. Only the Treehouse of the Mind had been new, but that in itself had been unusual. Not a road or a territory, more of a rest-stop, a pathetic place not worthy of his attention. (Manx liked to have the run of the highways and byways and that was why his map - his territory - was the biggest.)

“What sort of Creative are you? How did you _come_ here?” he asks, staring down the white road in the direction of his current nemesis. “I never invited you.” The pitch of his voice has risen and blackened with bile. “This is my land - my kingdom - my world!” he roars. With a twitch he looks back at the young girl on the back seat and offers her what he believes is a reassuring smile. It might be, could be, but it is not. It’s crescent shaped, white and sharp.

Having seen the Girl With the Pitch Black Hair and the Crow-Man, Ellie has a new-formed but very solid idea of what sort of smiles are nice and what ones are not no matter the length of the canines involved. Ellie continues to huddle in the furthest corner of the backseat with arms folded over herself as far away from Mr Manx as she is able to get.

“I do not blame you for your fear, oh no I do not,” Manx says smoothly in a half sing song tone as if he’s still talking to himself. “The world is a bad, bad lot and so many men fall prey to it - women too. It is a pity in some regards… But Christmasland only has space for those who make the list - my list.” In seconds the shade of his irises darken from milk-chocolate to bitter and beyond to the cacao used in ancient sacrifices to gods with a lot of harsh consonants in their names.

The child in the back seat thinks to ask about chocolate for a moment and whether there’s any in Christmasland. But then she thinks of strangers and the fact that she is far away from home and does not wish to be. Chocolate is not going to make her world better - only briefly sweet - she is smart enough to know the difference.

Manx shifts in his seat, gripping the wheel firmly. His eyes are nearly as wide and glaring as the Wraith’s lights as they watch, waiting for the signal.

Bing has yet to return to him but that’s almost to be expected. Bing is on thin ice as it is; he is… tainted - or at the least not entirely trustworthy. He’s never going to make the list. If he finally pulls his not-insignificant bodily weight into gear and successfully deals with that other nuisance - the blond one - then Manx might consider bringing him back. It rather depends on how much he’s been gnawed on by the inhabitants of the forest in the meantime. (He had promised his daughters another nice, juicy, substantial meal before Thanksgiving, after all…)

The road ahead goes dark for a moment. Manx flexes his driving gloves against the pristine black halo of the Wraith’s steering wheel. “Oh ho oh ho,” he hisses quietly to himself, sitting forward in the front seat, a hound ready for the hunt. “You have tussled with the wrong man. Fool Charlie once, shame on him… No one, but _no one_ gets the better of Charlie Manx a second time.” His mouth does something unpleasant, maintaining both a close-lipped smile whilst at the same time displaying an impossible amount of teeth. He revs the Wraith’s engine, dips the lights and presses his smart black boot all the way down on the accelerator. He opens his mouth in song a moment later, not exactly tuneful but his tone is horribly commanding: “Whip crack away, whip crack away! Can you hear the sound? We’re all bound - FOR CHRISTMASLAND!”

* * *

Creatives are lost descendants of the Nephilim, those children born of human and angelic union and one of the reasons the Almighty sent the Flood. All the original Nephilim were wiped out. But due to a certain demon being uncomfortable with drowning children and telling himself it was against the Lord’s plan to rescue them, a few of the Nephilim’s progeny ended up as stowaways on the Ark. The demon in question extracted the clinging children from his robes with a certain amount of embarrassment as soon as the ravens failed to return.

“You can't go, Crawly. They didn’t come back!” a certain angel argued. “It’s still raining. The water’s too high - you’ll drown!”

The demon in question who whilst privately pleased to have rescued a dozen children, but utterly sick of being on a boat, was acerbic. “Have you met a raven, angel? They’re smart - brains the size of - I dunno - but bloody big brains for a bird. They remember places and faces and all manner of stuff. If they didn’t come back it’s because they found somewhere better to be than this floating shithole!” Crawly had left, much to the inconsolable distress of the rescued children and the vast annoyance of Eden’s Eastern Guardian.

That annoyance wasn’t tempered any when a week later Noah sent out doves who eventually returned with an olive sprig. Aziraphale wasn’t an idiot. He knew where ravens could happily nest, and where doves could not. And he calculated how long it would have taken for a local salt-deluged low-land olive tree to put forth a new sprig. And then he gave serious thought as to whether he’d been wrong to dismiss Crawly’s thoughts in the way that he had, before deciding it was generally a bad idea to give a demon something to be smug about, and steering clear of the topic of doves and ravens for the next few millennia.

It would not please Crowley to know that Charlie Manx is technically his fault, although he might take a little comfort and much amusement if he knew the antics the other Creatives had got up to throughout history, honing their strange gifts and burrowing their secret tunnels, their shorter ways, boring through the map of the globe and to far stranger places too.

* * *

The greater the Bentley’s speed the louder her radio: she has broken free of the Christmas songs and is belting out Hendrix’s version of _‘All Along The Watchtower’_ at full volume. Normally Aziraphale would have winced - bebop isn’t his thing. But he recognizes it as Crowley’s sort of music, as well as having similarities to a story in the Book of Isaiah, and for once he acknowledges it as perfectly fitting and so doesn’t scowl or fret.

There are times to play by the rules and there were times to say to Hell with it and just shine as brightly as one can. The Bentley remembered the M25. She hadn’t been as aware then; the Apocalypse, the M25, the Antichrist, all of these things had helped her awaken and know all the true pieces of herself that had just been waiting for that extra spark of something, that little nudge, to achieve a rough sort of sentience - or at least personality.

The Bentley isn’t against Christmas songs necessarily. She just only really likes ‘I’m Walking Backwards For Christmas’ by The Goons, ‘New York Fairytale’ by The Pogues, and, if she’s feeling obnoxious, ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ by Slade.

For a moment the Bentley calls up ‘Stand And Deliver’ before deciding that doesn't have quite the gravitas she's after. She amends Adam & The Ants into ‘Layla’ by Cream (although truth be told she only likes the first bit.) As soon as it slows she blares out at even louder volume a song demanding that no one should Fear the Reaper.

Had anyone one cared to ask Aziraphale at this point he would have told them several things. Firstly, he feared for Crowley, secondly he feared for the child, thirdly he feared how on earth they were going to get out of this place but fourthly and most importantly, he did not fear the Reaper. Although he was, if he was being perfectly honest, questioning the Bentley’s ever-changing choice of music right now.

Time does strange things: it isn’t the Bentley’s fault, she only knows one way to get from naught to sixty but knows a far better way to get from naught to one hundred...

“Oh no - no no no no noooooo!”

She picks up on his distress but not the correct bit (she’s only a car.) As they race down the narrow snow-white track, the Bentley decides to use Charlie Manx’s style against him: she dives straight into ‘Carol of the Bells’ by the Trans Siberian Orchestra at full volume and full throttle.

The angel grips the steering wheel in white knuckled terror and knows (as he has always feared) the Bentley only does as she wishes and it has bugger all to do with him. As if to reassure him, a lyric or two of Queen floats in over the radio against the backdrop of heavy orchestral harmonies that seem to prophesy only one outcome: doom.

_Oh the machine of a dream, such a clean machine…_

Crowley had believed in both him and the Bentley and the angel was going to repay that trust no matter what. Aziraphale smiles; it’s not a smile Heaven would approve of. “The pistons are pumping,” he agrees, “And the hubcaps all gleam…”And he smiles wider even as the wild orchestral music returns, smiles like the best and worst of any bastard who knows something you don’t as he’s leaning over the wheel in the dark, staring down the road, white curly hair almost glowing, as is his suit…

Well. He is an angel.

What did you expect?


	7. Chapter 7

_The next morn dawned both bright and gay;  
It was to be our wedding day  
The feast is set the blessings said,  
I tell this tale now we are wed.  
'My love' said Fox, 'what do you mean?  
Your story was naught but a dream.' _

On a near-dark snow-lined road, two cars pick up speed, heading towards one another on a collision course. And from the sky, one dark-winged Occult Being barrels earthwards like a bullet shot into a gravity well.

Crowley tucks his wings in tight like a bird of prey and drops from the sky, angling his feathers to pull him up at the last second and straight into the Wraith. He holds the starter-crank out before him in his fist and not only imagines but believes with all his heart that the metal in his hand will punch seamlessly through the back passenger window of the Wraith and allow him to crash into the back seat, no matter what enchantments Manx has in place…

* * *

Aziraphale has second, third, forth and fifth thoughts as he and the Bentley accelerate, and all those thoughts - one to five - are some variation of shouting at Crowley very loudly. And it’s not really fair or angelic, he knows in his heart of hearts, it’s just that he isn’t very good at - at - at… at _Crowley_. Crowley the Enemy, the Tempter, the Serpent… the associate, the _friend_ the lov- the - well really that was nobody else’s business, especially right now, thank you very much.

Aziraphale presses his foot all the way down, it’s not as if the Bentley needs the encouragement, but it makes him feel as if he has some measure of control and it’s an illusion he’ll happily take comfort in. A few lines of T S Eliot’s poetry come to him unbidden.

_Lily, she was a girl what had brains in her head  
She wouldn't have nothing  
No, not that much said  
If it come to an argument or a dispute  
She would settle it offhand with the toe of her boot…_

He eases his shoe off the peddle a touch but the Bentley doesn’t slow in the least, does in fact, increase another 10mph which he hadn’t though possible. “Oh! Of course dear girl,” the angel murmurs, “I’m certain you know best.”

The demon has never named the Bentley because as far as he is concerned there is no other car he could possibly mistake her for - she is one of a kind - she is The Bentley.

Aziraphale has in this moment, in the privacy of his own thoughts, just named the Bentley Lily LaRose after T S Eliot’s pugilistic barmaid. (In his defense, Eliot and the Bentley were contemporaries so it’s fitting in a way and right now the Bentley is gunning to put a fist in someone’s eye if not a corkscrew.)

Crowley always professes to loathe Eliot, but Aziraphale recalls he’s able to quote rather a lot of it flawlessly for one who hates it so.

There is light on the white road between the pines: the Wraith’s headlights have come round the last deceptively gentle curve in the road and are no longer a hazy promise of illumination but are shining full bore through the windscreen straight ahead.

Aziraphale tightens his hold on the steering wheel. “Lily LaRose, my dear, if you wouldn’t mind?” he invites.

In response the Bentley increases her speed to 150mph all the while singing ‘We Will Rock You’ at full volume as if she wished all of Christmasland to hear it.

* * *

Crowley knows he only has scant seconds, but if he managed to stop time in the face of Lucifer he reckons he can stretch time out a little bit here without tearing the fabric of reality. Or at least that’s the idea…

He smashes through the Wraith’s window with the Bentley’s starter-crank and slams past the child to pitch up against the far door, legs and limbs in disarray, sunglasses crooked. He has a second or so, maybe less. “Let’s get out of here,” he tells her, grabbing her hand, hoping she’ll trust him enough to follow.

Ellie Atherton has had a very long and unhappy night. Where as she would never normally take the hand of a stranger - especially one with amber eyes, blood red hair and a pair of raven’s wings who had just smashed through a car window - right now she was willing to take the hand of almost anyone so long as they got her away from Charlie Manx and out of his horrid big ol’ car.

“Hold on,” the crow-man instructs, only for a moment he isn’t a man at all, he’s a giant black snake with a scarlet belly who’s coiling round her so she won’t get cut on the fragments of glass left in the window. The next moment she’s out of the Wraith and the relief is so profound it’s a physical reaction, like being able to breathe air after swallowing seawater.

An instant later Ellie’s in the sky, but whatever is holding and propelling her is faltering. It’s like those dreams of being chased and you discover you can fly - but you can’t fly fast or high enough and when you most need it the power fails you… The power desperately trying to lift her skywards is failing now. There’s a hiss by her ear, the sort of noise grown-ups make when they’re trying to pretend something doesn’t hurt. Words are muttered in a language she doesn’t know but she knows pain when she hears it and they’re descending rapidly into a clearing in front of some sort of fairground, an oasis of bright lights in the darkness of endless pine trees. The man with the funny eyes brings them to earth in a graceless bundle, curling round her and rolling so he bears the brunt of the impact and the bruises, getting snow all over his jacket and in his hair.

She stands on wobbly legs, brushing snow from the skirt of her nightgown. She looks at her rescuer, scrunches her nose and chews ruminatively on the edge of her right thumb as the crow-man gets his breath back and scuffs snow out of his hair and from the collar of his jacket. “You got wings,” she accuses.

Crowley winces: smashing through a car window as it travels at speed has taken more out of him than he cares to admit. His hand is a bloody mess and he has numerous cuts and bruises on his face, shoulders and wings. “Yeah,” he agrees tiredly, removing his broken sunglasses and dropping them in the snow.

“You an angel?”

“Not for a long time,” he says, dragging himself to his feet. He offers his left hand, the one that isn’t bleeding and still gripping a starter-crank. “Come on. We’ve got to get you home.”

“I don’t know the way,” she admits in a small voice.

“Well, you stick with me and we’ll…”

There is the low screech of metal under pressure. They both turn warily as the vast gates to the amusement park at their back creek open, rusty hinges grinding together like wrought iron teeth.

Ellie takes Crowley’s hand and shelters under his wing, using him as a shield and peeking out from behind his left hip.

The demon glowers at the expanse of glittering lights and gaudy signs, the decorated trees and the painted huts that make up the amusement park. Unlike most who encounter Christmasland for the first time, the demon can sense an undertow of blood and violence lent a shallow grave by the powdery snow.

“Stay by me,” he tells the kid.

A small figure emerges from the shadows to stand in the bright lights of the gates. It’s a child wearing a hand-me-down coat and woolen beanie. They approach looking wan and uncertain, lost and in need of care.

“Are you my mama?”

“What?” Crowley has hung out with humanity forever, but he’s been mostly stuck in Britain for the past couple of hundred years so the accent with its heavy Southern drawl takes him a moment to decode. “Am I your…?” He focuses on the child, a skinny boy of perhaps seven with pale hair and dark bruises under his eyes. “What’s that deary?” he asks, his voice the lilting Scottish tones of Nanny Ashtoreth. Something in his posture changes too although it’s hard to put a finger on exactly what: his attitude is more feminine somehow, his angles smoothed into the faintest suggestion of shallow curves. “Have you become lost, my sweet?”

Ellie tugs back on his hand. “Wanna go,” she mumbles.

“Are you my mama?”

“Wanna go _now_ …”

Crowley kneels in front of them and places a bloody yet maternally meant hand lightly on the child’s shoulder. “No, I can’t say as I am, poppet…”

A sea-change takes place in the child’s face, its eyes hardening. “Then you must be a drifter!” it hisses before ramming a wicked set of shining shears straight into the demon’s chest.

Ellie screams.

Crowley rocks back with a cry, batting the child away from him with the starter-crank and a strength he rarely displays, sending the thing flying to land seven feet away at the base of a gaudy sign showing directions to ‘Santa Claws Petting Zoo’.

The demon looks queasily down at the scissors sticking out of his right shoulder, lodged in his upper ribs, a breath away from making the acquaintance of his lungs. “Ah, bugger,” he mutters.


	8. Chapter 8

_Hold fast sir Fox where you do stand –  
Behold your last love's wretched hand! –  
(It is not so, it was not so and god forbid it should be so!)  
That was my lord Fox's final breath  
As all drew swords and screamed for death._

A reality forged of one man’s desire.

Two vintage cars.

Snow.

A narrow road.

A lot of pine trees.

There was only ever going to be one outcome.

* * *

The Bentley isn’t above spite: she sings ‘We Are The Champions’ as the angel slowly reverses away from the final tree. The Bentley has a few cosmetic scratches which are nothing that can’t be sorted by a lazy mechanic or a quick demonic wave of the hand because the angel and the Bentley have been true to their word; they met the Wraith head on, pushed it off the road and ploughed it into a tree. And then another, another, a fourth, a fifth, and then several more for good measure.

The Bentley tried to pin the Wraith to a tree, she really did, but her divine armour made trees a lot more flimsy than she recalled them ever being. And… well… it really was immensely satisfying and she’d definitely enjoyed herself. With every tree she’d imagined the Wraith weakening, screaming, writhing; and whilst she couldn’t actually smile, her headlights twinkled in what could be taken for glee. At around tree number nine (or it might have been eleven, she’d not had much practice with the concept of counting) the angel had patted his hand on her steering wheel and suggested it was time to find Crowley.

Both the Bentley and the angel had paused to look out into the dark and snowy landscape amidst the obliterated pines, furrowed snow, tree-sap, blood and engine grease. In front of them, there was the sad and crumpled wreck of what had once been a majestic vintage car, snow obscuring its once gleaming paint, the first hint of flames licking at the shadow of its undercarriage…

The Bentley’s engine makes a noise, frustrated and impatient. The message is clear: she’d rather find Crowley alive than watch the Wraith die. Aziraphale is shaken out of his fugue by the sound. “Yes - yes my dear you’re quite right,” he murmurs, still a little awed by what he’s done. He’s never been in a car crash before. “Now if we can only maneuver back onto the road… Oh, I don’t doubt you, but there are a lot of trees - oh!”

The Bentley’s reply is to switch to ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ - she is still blessed after all and trees can’t stop her, probably never could the way Crowley thinks of her.

 _“I’m having such a good time - I’m having a ball!”_ Freddie agrees over her sound system. The angel says nothing although a small startled squeak does press out of him as the Bentley bounds forward through the snow with the keenness of a Golden Retriever and the strength of a Great Dane - albeit one the size of a tank.

“Oh dear Lord - oh my! Honestly - _Lily!”_ the angel first mutters then half shrieks as trees and snow zap past him at inhuman speeds as they hook back onto the road at an alarming angle that should have had them ploughing into the pines opposite but somehow has them swinging smooth as butter onto the white road between the midnight trees.

“Where are you going? Do you even know - oh!”

The Bentley roars towards some sort of park or amusement palace - some vast oasis of coloured lights and bright paint. The first touch of humanity’s presence in the long lonely expanse of road they’d seen that night.

Lily LaRose pulls up at an atrocious angle towards a set of gates and then skids to align perfectly with a large huddled lump in the snow. The Bentley’s passenger door opens wide and the front seat clicks forward, waiting.

Dark wings displace the blood stained snow they’re covered in and Eden’s Serpent stands, joint by lanky joint, a young and disheveled child close at his side in the crook of one arm. Something crimson and silver glints in the snow at his feet as he folds his wings away. He tries to swagger but it’s a little off, a little unsteady; he manages an approximation none the less.

Aziraphale gets out of the Bentley. “Crowley?”

“Yeah. Here - take her - go. You gotta leave now.” His voice is flat and he strives to all but fling Ellie at the angel. “There’s a vermin problem I gotta deal with.”

Ellie isn’t so keen to leave; her arms are wrapped around the demon as if he’s something more precious than gold - and perhaps he is. After all, he is the first adult in all of Ellie’s experience who has rescued her from a nightmare instead of just telling her there’s no such thing as monsters and she ought go back to sleep. “He got all hurt - there’s blood!”

Crowley does his best to disentangle the child and find his legs, his wings, his - something - what’s he after again? The gates - that’s it - where are the bloody gates?

“Oh dear Lord…” Aziraphale looks at the child’s expression and understands that nothing short of a full-on miracle will stop her from clutching at Crowley right now: she has found her piece of safety and it will only be pried from her cold dead little hands. In the normal way of things the angel might have found it amusing, but nothing was normal about their state of affairs right now. “Crowley, what are you talking about - what vermin?”

Crowley turns unsteadily to face the gates of Christmasland that he had closed and barred with the powers of Hell. Standing just behind them, are rank upon rank of eerily silent and oddly dressed children. He points, the gesture halfway between dramatic and dismissive. “Them.”

“But they’re _children_ …”

In reply Crowley ponderously collapses onto his knees amidst the snow-slurry by the Bentley’s passenger door. “I’m alright - I’m fine,’ he offers a moment later, struggling to stand.

“Oh drifter-man?” It’s a girl a little older than the rest of the pack, perhaps twelve. Her hair is a long mane of black like an oil-slick; she wears a toy-soldier’s coat and carries a cavalry sabre in her fist. “We haven’t finished our game. You can’t stop playing before someone’s won - it’s against the rules.”

Ellie makes a noise between a shriek and a squeak and bundles Crowley into the Bentley by tackling him at the hips like some sort of sports pro; they both barrel into the back passenger seat with more force than is necessary. Crowley smacks his head on something metal but still tries to curve his body so the child (there is a child, isn’t there?) will be safe. There's a curious numbness in his hands, his head, his heart... (Where are all his thoughts going? Really they should behave better than to run off like - like…) Someone is shouting at him - possibly some sort of sub-species of banshee.

“Crow-man? _Crow-man!”_

“Mm… yh?”

“Can we go home?”

“Crowley?” asks an infinitely more familiar voice with a hint of peevishness. “I rather thought you were going to drive now?”

“Mmm.”

“My mama’s worried, I know she is.”

(For Heaven’s sake - why can’t Aziraphale field this?) “Mm. Yeh - ye…”

“Crow-man?”

“Really, this is no time for a nap…”

“Mhm… go ‘way,” Crowley murmurs vaguely.

Ellie latches onto him, thin arms curling round an equally thin torso in the back of the Bentley. He has fair skin but now it looks sorta grubby-pale like he’s sick. Ellie kneels up and is relieved to discover there is no invisible barrier between the front and back of this car, which means she can put her hands on the shoulder of the front seat and lean her face right up close to the other man’s ear.

“Ah!”

“He’s hurt.”

It takes a moment for Aziraphale to understand, or rather to know what to do with a child’s face up against his as if she thinks it has a perfect right to be there, cheek pressed close. “He’s…?” He tries to peer around the child and fails. “Could you…?” he makes a little shoo’ing motion. She obediently retreats to perch on the seat by the demon’s skinny shins. Now he is paying attention the angel can see the child has some blood on her nightdress and Crowley has a wide patch on the front of his shirt that is clinging to his skin, damp and dark.

“Crowley?”

“Mm?”

“Wake up!”

“I am,” he says, although it sounds more like ‘yam’.

“Crowley?”

He knows that voice. It’s a ridiculously kind voice - a voice that in all creation has no business being that kind to him, but still here it is. There is a hand on his arm too, it’s a warm soft palm he doesn’t deserve, never has, but he’s always glad to find it there.

“Crowley? Are you alright?”

A simple question that he has no idea how to answer right now. “I…” he tries and fails to sit up. “I…” Something hurts and he presses a hand there and it comes back red. “Ah fuck,” he mumbles before everything goes an interesting and static-y shade of black. The black doesn’t last however: there is a feeling like someone trying to pull a holly tree out of his chest. “Ah! The bloody blistering - ahh!”

“Keep still! Almost there… The wounds seem to be infected with the essence of this place - nasty stuff…”

To his immense relief the holly-tree-tearing-through-his-lungs-and-sternum feeling dulls to the kinder feeling of someone vacuuming glass splinters from the sub-dermal layer of his skin and finally, blissfully to the warm, sunlight feeling of Aziraphale’s grace as it soothes the last of the agony away. Crowley lets out a relieved and ragged sigh and squints one eye open experimentally. “…. Angel?”

“Are you back with us?”

“I don’t bloody know - oww fucking _cunt_ …” His hand and chest both ache fiercely.

“CROWLEY!”

“What?” He drags himself up to meet the gaze of a small, tartan-blanket infused child still adhered to his lower legs. “It’s not mine!” he snaps in automatic panic much as someone who dislikes pets will do when they are being determinedly followed by a stray kitten. “Oh, wait, it’s you. Emily or something, wasn’t it?”

“Ellie. You said a bad word.”

“Crowley…”

“Bloody hell, what? Can’t you see I’m conversing? Not to mention I’ve just been stabbed by some little gob-shite with a pair of scissors. So, y’know, conversing _and_ convalescing - focus up - priorities angel!”

“Crowley!” Aziraphale sounds vexed beyond all measure but that’s only because he’s just had to heal a not insignificant wound to the demon’s corporation. “I’m certain there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for…”

“You didn’t see it - teeth worse than Dagon’s and the sort of expression serial killers practice in front of the mirror.”

He rolls his eyes. “It can’t be that bad, surely…”

“Aziraphale,” Crowley says in the tired tones of one whose patience is being sorely tested. “I have recently been stabbed in the chest by some sort of unholy imp - I take that back, not even imps go round stabbing people in the chest, they’ve got better manners - some sort of murder goblin. For all we know this whole place is infested with them. That’s the vermin problem I’ve gotta deal with…”

The angel fidgets. He doesn’t wish to believe such a thing is possible, but this place is very strange and very wrong; if anywhere could corrupt a child and turn them into a creature of violence, it’s certainly here.

As he dithers, the demon gathers his strength and finds his feet; as his hand settles on the door latch, Ellie’s hand settles on his. Crowley gives her a serpentine smile and brandishes the starter-crank of which he’s never let go. “I’m just gonna go sort that lot out. I’ll be back in a minute and then we’ll get you straight home. Your mum will be missing you, right?” His grin widens and thins until it’s sickle bright: his hand is on the handle of the Bentley’s passenger door and he’s about to go take on a theme park full of murder goblins because it’s not like you can leave that sort of bullshit lying around is it? And then he looks out of the window… _“Fuck,”_ he mouths in silent horror.

* * *

The lights of Christmasland flicker, once, twice, twitching and stuttering as if the generator that runs them is faulty - or dying. The snow starts to take on a fuzzy, multi-hued aspect like television static.

Reality is starting to unravel.

The denizens of Christmasland feel it in their bones. They shriek and howl in panic and run to hide in their favourite haunts, curling up small and whimpering as the very foundation of their world shakes and begins to fracture.

* * *

“Typical,” Crowley says in a deceptively matter-of fact voice. “Pest control will have to wait. We have to go - now!”

“But can’t you…”

“Aziraphale - drive!”

The angel gives Lily LaRose a look and she purrs into gear and settles into (what is for her) a very sedate 50mph.

“Oh I say - what’s happening to the sky?” Aziraphale asks, leaning over the steering wheel and squinting through the windscreen at the darkness above the tree line that’s spitting and crackling like a thousand broken TVs.

“It’s all falling apart,” Crowley explains through gritted teeth.“Drive faster, angel - for once in your bloody life!”

“What happened to not using miracles?” Aziraphale says crossly, increasing his speed from 50 to 65mph.

“I only locked the bloody gate! Maybe it’s Manx?”

“What?”

“I locked the gate with an intervention after that little shite stabbed me - but that can’t have been enough to tip it over the edge... Manx - is he dead?”

“I’m not certain. He was attempting to exit the car because it was on fire…”

For one who owned a bookshop Aziraphale never had bothered with a thesaurus. Crowley would be willing to bet that no one had ‘attempted to exit’ a car whilst it was on fire in the history of the world. Crawled from, clawed through, kicked or panicked out of, been dragged from, or burnt to a crisp in, but never merely ‘attempted to exit’. But right now Crowley doesn’t really care because he’s trying to hold a collapsing side reality together by force of will. And it isn’t even his reality and he doesn’t even like it and besides all of which it’s giving him a migraine of cosmic proportions and - “Drive faster,” he growls.

Much to Aziraphale’s consternation, the Bentley obeys and they zip along the darkening roads at speeds well in excess of UK law and indeed any maximum output the Bentley’s engine is capable of. (But Crowley had only been told her maximum speed once when he first bought her and he had been too busy grinning to himself and thinking what a magnificent piece of human ingenuity she was to actually bother listening.)


	9. Chapter 9

_As for me, I've oft' been told  
The heart within my breast is bold,  
Well now at night he calls to me  
So I have run fast wild and free  
For I am sharp of tooth and claw  
And I will hunt my rightful lord. _

There are rules to everything, even if you are not aware of them. A lack of physics and natural philosophy within your education does not negate the forces at work around you. You may attribute them to other powers, but you cannot deny that they are there - that they have happened. Rules exist, even if you dismiss them. Call them luck, or ascribe a happenstance to the fact you licked a particular lizard yesterday and now Nash’kahante must be pleased with you - it makes no difference. There are still rules.

Neither Aziraphale nor Crowley are aware that Creatives are descendants of the Nephilim. Nor are they aware that such beings can create their own portals and dreamscapes. Heaven and Hell don’t have a clue either.

Had Heaven paid more attention to Aziraphale’s ‘I say, this _is_ interesting…’ notes as he correlated and collaborated various tales together and tried to pick out the truth of them, then Heaven might have had a niggling suspicion that Nephilim - by blood if not by birth - were still knocking about the place.

Had Azirapahle paid more attention to the obscure folk tales that Crowley occasionally gifted him down the decades and centuries (‘I dunno you like that sort of thing don’t you? What am I gonna do with a bloody scroll - read it?!’) the angel might have understood a lot more about Creatives. Or at the very least realised that when the demon claimed he didn’t read he was definitely lying.

But Crowley is too magpie in his interests - picking up whatever shines brightest and hopping on - and Aziraphale is too mired in his locked ivory tower to ever believe there can be any use in such random, haphazard information. And so they are both ignorant of Creatives, of Knives, of Inscapes and the rules that govern them. Thus they are left, as they so often are, at the mercy of inspiration and ineffability.

* * *

The snoozing blanket by his legs suddenly rears up and the occupant convulses, coughing.

Crowley catches hold of her, keeping her steady, gentling her hair away from her face. “You alright?” he asks quietly as the fit eases.

She shakes her head and reluctantly shows him her palm. It’s filled with stringy, bright red spittle and two small white teeth. Her gaze meets his and for an instant he sees it: Fear of the Fall. Not the same from angel to demon but just as monstrous.

“Hold on to those,” he advises.

“Don’t wanna,” she mumbles.

“What if I hold on to them?”

She hands them over. Crowley pockets them and then leans forward to reiterate, “Angel can you please get us the fuck out of here!”

“Precisely what I am _trying_ to do!”

Crowley flops against the back passenger seat, frustrated and out of luck. “F’fuck's sake,” he mumbles. “Well I hope you’re pleased with yourself.” He’s irritated that out of all of history - all of humanity - all the wars and plagues and ongoing bullshit, it’s the Bentley and Aziraphale that are gonna do him in. He’s _persona non grata_ in Hell, a traitor, if he’s discorporated that’s it; it’s not like Beelzebub would smile and hand him over a shiny new body to inhabit.

The car’s engine makes the sort of unhappy noise that would have been terminal in any other car, and slows back to a choppy 70mph.

“What did you do?” the demon demands.

“Nothing! She runs herself, just as you said, it’s…”

“Crow-man?” the scruffy blanket enquires.

Crowley’s expression gentles, although if you told him that he would probably have stabbed you. “Mm - you alright?”

In reply she wriggles up as close as she can get despite all the angles being wrong until the demon is forced to cease sprawling and sit more normally upon the back seat of the Bentley - entirely for his comfort and not for hers, obviously.

“I’m tired...”

She’s not tired, he knows, she dying; this place is killing her. Crowley focuses what little will and imagination he has to spare on keeping her alive, on keeping her from falling and becoming some horrible goblin spawn.

“D’you know the song?”

“Not unless you tell me.”

“The home song.”

“You start an’ I’ll see if I can follow.”

“Mm… ok. My mama sings it to me when it’s late an’ we have to drive places and I don’t know where we’re going. _Once there was a way to get back homeward, Once there was a way to get back home._ _Sleep, pretty darling do not cry, And I will sing a lullaby…”_

Crowley recognises the song as ‘Golden Slumbers’ by The Beatles. He’s never been a huge fan of The Beatles, has preferred bands that came a few years later like Pink Floyd and The Velvet Underground. He’s always found the song a little creepy despite its harmonies. ‘Once there was a way to get back home’ rather suggested there wasn’t any more and some poor sod and his darling were going to be stuck on some limbo night-time road forever…

A half-there idea - more the outline of a thought - shuffles guiltily into Crowley’s brain without any excuse or a note from its parents explaining its tardiness. Usually that would have produced an entire portfolio of swearing at significant volume, but for once the demon considers such antics counter-productive. He drapes his arm across Ellie’s shoulders, tucking her against him. “Yeah, I know that one. How about I sing it for you, and you think of home and your mum?”

The child nods groggily, nestles closer and closes her eyes.

“Angel?” he says softly. “Close your eyes.”

“What? I couldn’t possibly…”

“Shhh! Just - oh just be quiet an’ close your eyes!” he hisses urgently.

With the utmost reluctance, Aziraphale does so.

Crowley sings; it’s not something he’s done in a long time, not since his Fall, but he’s never lost the knack.

The angel stifles a gasp. Crowley’s voice is beautiful, he thinks, like velvet and the finest Burgundy wine, rich and strong with hidden harmonies. The sort of voice that had once called forth stars from the void, and helped set the universe in motion.

_“Once there was a way  
To get back homeward  
Once there was a way  
To get back home  
Sleep, pretty darling  
Do not cry  
And I will sing a lullaby…” _

Crowley closes his eyes too, not because he’s absolutely certain that he needs to for this to work, but because it’s easier and if they do manage to escape this bloody stupid side-dimension they’re in he doesn’t want to see whatever non-Euclidean bullshit is holding this place up, thank you very fucking much. Well, here goes everything…

He composes his verse on the fly; it’s not exactly poetical genius but he hasn’t time to come up with anything better. He needs Ellie to imagine she can get back home and she has to do so _now_ …

 _“Resting soundly in your bed  
Home at last to lay your head  
Sleep pretty darling you’re safe now  
By luck we found the path somehow  
_ _Golden slumbers fill your eyes  
Smiles await you when you rise  
Sleep pretty darling  
Do not cry  
And I will sing a lullaby  
And I will sing a lullaby…”_

The Bentley’s gears grind in protest and then suddenly she is slowing, gliding to a demure stop. Both the demon and the angel risk opening their eyes. They are somewhere in mid-west small-town America, somewhere that probably used to have a coal mine or a car factory but now doesn’t have much of anything other than pealing paint and a sense of slow decay. The Bentley has parked outside of a gabled house in desperate need of renovation.

“Oh!” Aziraphale exclaims (sounding, Crowley thinks, excessively surprised.)

_“Oh?!”_

“We’re - well I do believe we’re…”

“You didn’t think I could do it!” The demon is scandalized. “That’s low, even for you. Aren’t angels meant to be beings of faith?”

“Only in the Almighty, dear,” the angel counters absently, looking out of the window at the sadly dilapidated little house in front of him. “Besides which, I think you’ll find I was the one driving…”

“The _Bentley_ was the one driving, angel, you had your eyes closed.”

“Yes, well… It’s a rather dowdy sort of a place isn’t it?” Aziraphale says doubtfully. “Are you sure this is it?”

“Yep.” Crowley is. “Room on the top right.”

“But how do you know?”

He shrugs. His night-vision is acute enough that he can see a child’s school painting tacked to the window, which a teacher has helpfully signed as ‘by Ellie A.’ in marker pen at the bottom.

“Well shall I - or will you…?”

Crowley sighs. “No, I’ll do it and you can miracle them a new roof or boiler or whatever it is you’re just _itching_ to do. I know you, angel.”

Aziraphale beams as Crowley snaps his fingers, his hand rising with the motion. Ellie, asleep in her tartan blanket, vanishes as the demonic miracle relocates her to her bed, tucked in safe and warm. The angel raises and then pulls his own hand down sharply with a snap of fingers and thumb: the house’s boiler is miraculously repaired as is the hole in the roof and the damp in the cellar; the paint on its outside is spruced up too. Aziraphale looks pleased with himself.

“You are nauseatingly predictable sometimes, you know that, right?” Crowley grumbles in a tone that is aiming for rancor, misses entirely, and hits fondness instead. “Right - that’s it - get out, angel. I’m driving.”

“But I was rather enjoying it!” he protests.

“Who got us out of Narnia? Me. Who’ll get as back to Soho? Me. Who has a sense of direction…”

“You, dear,” Aziraphale agrees with an amused sigh.

Hell has never tracked the use of miraculous powers in the way that Heaven does for the base reason that Hell doesn’t give a shit and is only interested in results. (Something Crowley has known from the start: if you can justify it in the report then Hell doesn’t care what sort of devilish interventions you use.) But Heaven isn’t like that, as Aziraphale has frequently lamented, and that’s why the angel tended to let Crowley take care of their travel plans.

This has, over the years, given the demon the idea that Aziraphale has no sense of direction and is prone to getting lost. This is unjust; he is in fact far less prone to getting lost than most people. But if one insists on doing things the old-fashioned way (reading maps, travelling on roads, that sort of thing) rather than via a snap of the fingers, then _statistically_ speaking, mistakes are bound to happen at some point. Thus, _statistically,_ Aziraphale has less sense of direction than Crowley. Although the demon’s statement that Aziraphale ‘could get lost in a bloody Sainsbury’s carpark’ is grossly misleading. (It had only happened once. And it had been _very_ dark.)

* * *

Ellie Atherton is curled up snug in her bed when her mother comes home from her shift at the hospital. There’s a tartan blanket her mother doesn’t recognize tucked across the lower half of the bead-spread.

Meg Atherton pushes the fabric of it back and forth between her fingers absently; it feels like its made of very fine wool. She doesn’t remember owning such a blanket, but then she had started to open and sort through her mother’s boxes - perhaps Ellie had been cold and snuck it from there? That makes sense.

She kisses Ellie lightly on the cheek and leaves her room, pulling the door closed just enough so a little of the hall light spills in.

* * *

“Well,” Aziraphale says huffily as he takes off his coat. “I’m certainly never going there again.”

“What, Claridge’s?”

“No not - of course not Claridge’s - their partridge is excellent! The other place…”

“Narnia?”

“I do wish you’d stop calling it that - Clive would be most upset, it wasn’t like his books at all.”

“No allegorical Lilith and no lamppost, just two creepy bastards in a car? Yeah, I s’pose you’re right.” Crowley sprawls inelegantly on the worn leather sofa that sits in the furthest corner of the bookshop.

Aziraphale fetches the whisky decanter and two tumblers, setting them on the table. “Do you think that’s it? That place - do you think it’s…” he waves a hand ineffectually. “Gone? For good?”

He shrugs. “Dunno. Probably depends whether Manx is really dead or not. Angel, the decanter won’t pour itself y’know… I could always check.”

“Check? - my dear you don’t mean to…”

“Naah, I’ll just ask downstairs.” He takes a large swig from the tumbler of whisky that’s just been offered to him. “We made a deal, me and Mr Manx. If he won, he’d take me an’ the Bentley to Christmasland. I said if I won, he an’ his car would come to _my_ Christmas land. He, most definitely, lost.” There was a good deal of satisfaction in that final statement.

Aziraphale nudges Crowley’s leg until it’s moved out of the way giving him space to sit on the sofa beside him. “Can cars go to Hell?” he muses, nursing his whisky.

Another lanky shrug. “Dunno. Don’t see why not. We had a deal.”

“I didn’t think your lot really went in for that sort of thing. Meeting mortals at crossroads and engaging in farcical contests of talent…”

“Eh,” Crowley says noncommittally. (He had in fact once given someone a golden fiddle but only because it had been funny and had caused the poor sod who’d ‘won’ it endless trouble. Turns out golden fiddles, whilst desirable, are rather unwieldy and not easily accepted as legal tender in the back-waters of Georgia - or anywhere else for that matter.)

“Do you think the child will be alright?” the angel frets.

Crowley gives him a look which is definitely scorn and not long-suffering affection. “You ridiculously soft git,” he accuses. “She’ll be fine. I put her teeth back in, didn’t I?”

“You - I beg your pardon?”

“Teeth, angel. All fixed. Well, the two she gave me, dunno if she’d lost any others. All back where they belong.”

“How on earth will you justify that in your reports? Reconstructive dentistry is hardly…”

“I don’t write reports anymore, remember? Neither do you. But if I did, I’d say it was all part of the sting operation to get Manx. I’d probably get a promotion. Manx is such a wanker they’ll be having fun with him down there for aeons.”

“Hm, I’m sure you’re right my dear…”

In the cozy, cluttered confines of an antiquarian bookshop in Soho, two beings, one Occult and one Aetherial, bicker back and forth on a shabby sofa as they work their way steadily through a decanter of whisky, one of brandy, four bottles of Riesling and six of rather fine Merlot.

Just outside the bookshop, parked by the curb on double yellow lines, the Bentley sings ‘We Are The Champions’ to herself, quiet and smug.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All done, please do leave kudos or comments if you enjoyed it =)
> 
> Incidentally, I wrote the Mr Fox poem after reading 'The White Road' by Neil Gaiman. I included it in-between the chapters because Christmasland also has feral children and a long white road, so it seemed appropriate.
> 
> The lovely and talented Purpleskiesofdragons has done a beautiful art piece inspired by the poem, which you can find here - http://fav.me/ddu9iiy


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